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Healthful snacks help kids
Food bank program promoting weekend nutrition goes national

By KRISTINE HUGHES / The Dallas Morning News
Arthur doesn't look homeless or chronically hungry.

North Texas Food Bank workers, including Chester Weyand (right), help fill backpacks for hungry schoolchildren. The program serves children in Dallas and three suburban districts. Photos by COURTNEY PERRY/Special Contributor

He's neat, clean and slightly overweight, but that's mostly because of a diet of cheap, high-fat and nutrient-poor foods.
Every afternoon, the Richardson second-grader joins family members as they leave their motel room to earn money for dinner by painting addresses on curbs.

The little they earn doesn't stretch far for the family of five. If it weren't for the backpack of nutritious snacks the 7-year-old gets at RISD Academy every Friday, he would probably go hungry most weekends, too.

Arthur is one of about 700 Dallas-area students who are sent home with healthful, kid-friendly snacks to tide them over until Monday. The North Texas Food Bank's Food 4 Kids program provides the snacks.
Food 4 Kids was piloted in five Dallas schools last year and spread to three suburban districts this year. On Nov. 29, the national council for America's Second Harvest – The Nation's Food Bank Network voted to expand it nationwide.

Schools in more than 200 cities will be added in coming years, said Jan Pruitt, CEO of the North Texas Food Bank and national council chairwoman for America's Second Harvest.

"There are children who go home every Friday when they leave school and don't eat a good meal until they return to school on Monday," Mrs. Pruitt said. "If we do not take care of their basic need for food, they will not grow and thrive."

The food bank offers the program through schools because teachers know which students don't eat over the weekend. They also know that hungry children can cause disruptions, cannot learn properly and miss more school.

Identifying them is the first hurdle.
"It's not just kids whose families are below the poverty line, who are in the free and reduced lunch program, or who are skinny," Mrs. Pruitt said. "It's the child who walks in the door on Monday morning and asks for crackers before they can get to the breakfast line, who are bringing food back from lunch in their pockets."

More children fit that description in the Dallas region than people realize, she said. Texas is No. 1 in the U.S. for having the most families at risk of hunger, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The program serves about 50 children at each of eight schools in Dallas, four schools in Richardson, two in Grand Prairie and one in Carrollton-Farmers Branch.

Richardson chose its schools based on the highest percentage of students receiving free and reduced-price lunches. When a campus is selected, food bank dietitian Kaitlin Hammond coaches teachers on signs of malnutrition and food insecurity. Besides physical signs, a chronically hungry student may ask frequently when the next meal or snack will be. The student may rush the cafeteria line, eat fast or ask for seconds.

Backpacks are offered as soon as a teacher refers a student to the school counselor. Parents are informed by phone or with a note in the first backpack.

Some students also take home extra packages for siblings or to last through a holiday break.

The contents must be nutritious and something a child can prepare. The food bank can't use its normal staples because a can of corn or box of macaroni and cheese won't be useful to a child who's home alone much of the time.

Food bank officials buy the items with cash donations. It costs $4 to fill each backpack with trail mix, milk and juice boxes, applesauce and pudding, breakfast bars, crackers and more.

Coordinators at schools that have been participating in the program say it has made a big difference for some students. NaSha Book at Jill Stone Elementary at Vickery Meadow in Dallas said the students look healthier and seem to act out less.The school hands out more than 80 packs a week and continues to add participants almost daily. The neighborhood includes several low-income apartment complexes whose residents are mainly minimum-wage workers.

"A lot of them are just contract workers who wait to get picked up for various jobs," said Ms. Book, who is coordinator of the backpack distribution program. "If they don't get picked up that day, they don't bring home money for the day or week."

At RISD Academy recently, a dozen students filed into a school classroom to pick up food while counselor Maria Alvarado quietly told a visitor some of their stories.
Jorge is the last of nine children from a mother who has struggled with drug addiction.

Chelsea, a fourth-grader, is the latchkey kid of a single mother displaced by Hurricane Katrina. And Arthur shares his food with two brothers. Ms. Alvarado said that day he had already asked her about the food four times.

"Right after lunch he came to see me – food all over his face – asking, 'Is today the day?' " she said.

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